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The party lasted what the dawn in Beijing. On the second floor of the luxury hotel Shagri-la in Haidan, the Pekingese neighborhood that also houses the Wukasong Sports Center where the team made history on another Sunday in September, players, coaching staff, members of the federation, family members (not too many to be they displaced China), sponsors and the press that has covered the wanderings of Spain during these more than two troubled weeks through the Asian country, celebrated a gold so unexpected, so historic, so incredible, as exhausted.
He ate dinner, drank and danced, in this order . Tsingtao was running and, rather than reaggeton , Izal , Vetusta Morla and Leiva sounded. A gold to the rhythm of indie , The woman in green as a top theme, with Rudy Fernández in the work of DJ and the microphone hand in hand. The World Cup, bright, plethoric, full of ice. And the medals to the neck, beautiful Chinese design, everything must be said.
Veterans say that Saitama's first night was much wilder. It was not an excessive celebration this time, that the custom appeases the spirits and there are not so many twenties. But they also did not fall short. "That we are world champions, fuck!" Shouted one of the players from time to time. It was begged for mobiles to go. Pierre Oriola joked about the Super Cup in the Palace just around the corner and those who were not in 2006, who were all but Marc Gasol and Rudy , asked if that reception of Plaza de Castilla in which Pepu Hernández left the scream forever from "ba-lon-ces-to" was so massive.
But the IB2888 charter chartered by Iberia for the occasion was waiting to leave at 10:00 a.m. and the Pekingese traffic jam every morning too, more than an hour to the airport, with the sunset in front. And there, the chaos of the controls, the medals that made the alarms jump through the winches, the Chinese bureaucracy colliding with the euphoria and fatigue of the expedition. It was no longer time to return to Spain. "Imagine this with a fourth place," said one of the players, tired of a World Cup and an exhausting country, in which each small process - from ordering food to register at a hotel - is an odyssey. "The only thing I want is to see my son and a pot of my mother," joked a member of the coaching staff, that Asian food also made a dent.
With a delay, a little before 6 pm, the world champions, with a sleepy face but indelible smiles, landed on T4 in Barajas. The waiting fans returned the dimension of what was achieved.
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